Halo Wars

Say Halo to Sgt. Forge

Halo, for all intents and purposes is Microsoft’s Star Wars: a sprawling sci-fi yarn with a deeply convoluted history spanning hundreds of years. Now that history is being expanded even further in Halo Wars, the franchise’s brave entry into the console RTS, set 20 years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo Wars recounts the story of how humans ended up waging an intergalactic war against the Covenant forces and features all the trappings you’d expect from a Halo game right down to the skidding Warthogs, battle-hardened Spartans, choral soundtrack and lovely blue menu screens.

With Ensemble’s RTS pedigree earned through seminal strategy games such as Age of Empires, the studio have been presented with the daunting task of building a fast–paced action RTS game specifically for the Xbox 360. Halo Wars is that very game and boasts a control system that gives the traditional mouse and keyboard set-up a serious run for its money. When we were told that Halo Wars’ control system was singled out as the core focus before making the game we knew that Ensemble had to be on to something special. As promised, Halo Wars’ control interface delivers, making the game quite possibly the most playable console RTS yet. Controlling the action is as intuitive and accessible as you’d expect with only a few simple commands to memorise. In devising a control scheme which is easy to use without watering-down any of the RTS action, Ensemble have opened up the genre to the entire console audience, far beyond the hardcore RTS fan and the Halo devotee. This is a game that anyone can play. However, if you’re expecting a walk in the park conquering Halo Wars’ single-player campaign, you can cast that very thought out of your mind right now, as it still presents a pretty firm challenge.

Halo Wars may do away with almost all of the fiddly micromanagement elements that are normally part and parcel of the genre, but it doesn’t do it at the expense of providing a set of deep and involving tools to play with, more on which later. Its single-player campaign forces a different approach in each of its fifteen missions, throwing up interesting objectives that require judicious planning to make the most of the resources at your disposal. Once you’ve had a chance to learn the basics, you’re thrown right in at the deep end, perfectly illustrated by the third single-player mission, which sees the city of Arcadia besieged by the Covenant. It’s your job to protect the evacuation effort by protecting three huge dropships carrying survivors from destruction. One is unavoidably scripted to blow, but the other two are under serious threat from both ground and aerial attacks. You begin the mission with limited resources, so do you allocate valuable time to establishing a base to generate extra units? Can you afford to be looking after your base, leaving the cargo ships vulnerable or do you hope that your base will look after itself? Can you even afford to send valuable units on a base building errand to begin with? Its decisions like these that keep Halo Wars missions engaging and interesting while inviting varying approaches alongside experimentation.

RTS staples such as base building and resource management have been made far more approachable and user-friendly with your base, which is a neat, self-contained area on the map. Commencing with a central fortress (or keep/citadel in the Covenant’s case), you are then allowed to construct various specialist buildings around it. Upgrading your fortress unlocks up to seven spaces to build upon and you’ll soon hit upon the most effective base configuration. Supply pads are the most useful as they generate extra resources that grants currency to purchase tanks, troops, upgrades and other useful objects to aid you in battle. Whether to create extra supplies at the expense of other potentially more useful but less profitable buildings is something else that has to be taken into consideration – do you judge strength in numbers or strength in fewer, more formidable units to be the optimum approach? You’ll soon adopt your own favoured method of assembling your forces, whether it’s over a long period of time, creating the best army you can or a quick fix method to churn out as many fighting units as you can possibly muster. Both might work equally well depending on how you plan your attacks – this is a strategy game after all.

These decisions carry extra weight when you’re playing in the multiplayer skirmish mode where your base is your commencing focal point. From here it’s a race to see who can form their army the fastest and who then has the cajones to risk everything in attempting an assault on their opponent’s base. Skirmish proves an excellent way to test your strategic mettle as well as your pointing and clicking speed. It’s also an inordinate amount of fun for something so time consuming and hands-on. The sense of gratification gained from seeing your rival’s base reduced to a smouldering heap of scrap by your mighty forces is immense and will motivate you to revisit multiplayer again and again. Yet despite the obvious appeal of multiplayer, it’s hard to tell how long you’ll want to revisit it once you’ve experimented with the different factions and played all of the maps. Each faction has its own special ability granting them a unique advantage in battle, so there’s at least some motivation to return and try new things.

Single-player also attempts to entice you back by granting medals for finishing missions quickly, and completing secondary objectives. There are also hidden collectibles in the shape of fifteen skulls, which you can use to modify the game in exactly the same way Halo allowed. Also, the fifteen hidden black boxes must be gathered if you want to complete the entire Halo timeline featured as an added bonus on the main menu. Some will welcome the extra effort to invite replay, others simply won’t care enough to bother.

Although Halo Wars is certainly not the first attempt to streamline the RTS genre for console play, what Ensemble have achieved is nothing short of astonishing. It may not prove to be the finest example in presenting lasting appeal – single-player certainly doesn’t last all that long – but ultimately, Halo Wars stands out as an RTS experience that works incredibly well while ticking all of the right boxes for the fans. There’s plenty here for the Halo faithful to get their teeth into and enough broad appeal to convert even the most ardent strategy-hater. Whether you persevere enough to embrace everything Halo Wars has to offer really depends on how much you enjoy the universe and how much you’re willing to accept the advent of a thoroughly console-centric RTS. Us? We think it’s great, so you should too. It’s Halo-mentary.

81%

By Richard Walker